World Psoriasis Day 2021 - Japan

UNITED – Making everyone’s thought be one power!

Even though the treatment of psoriatic disease has dramatically progressed in a decade, there are people with psoriatic disease who have been needlessly suffered due to low awareness of the disease in my country. INSPIRE JAPAN WPD has been organized to address this issue since 2017, and has been conducting several activities for raising awareness and spreading right information about psoriatic disease around World Psoriasis Day every year.

The major activities of this year were:

• Campaign T-shirt designed to unite people nationwide
• Countdown to World Psoriasis Day with messages to people with psoriatic disease on Twitter and Facebook
• Online discussion with a guest dermatologist on root causes of poor communication between patients and physicians
• Psoriasis exhibition event at Toyo Tower.

We would like to describe some achievement of these activities. Not only people with psoriatic disease but also many dermatologists united to cheer ourselves up with their heartwarming messages in the campaign T-shirt. We made a short movie with the messages from them, and released it on our YouTube account. More than 650 people have already watched it. We initiated daily tweet from 100 days before World Psoriasis Day in order to warm it up. Although we usually got a few hundreds of impressions to our tweets, the number of impressions gradually increased with the countdown, and we were able to get 4-digit impressions constantly. The maximum was over 25,000 impressions. More than 350 people watched the online discussion on YouTube, which is now available on demand. The patient-physician communication has recently been one of the hottest topics in the therapeutic area of chronic diseases like psoriasis in my country. New cartoons of things only psoriatic disease can relate to, which were drawn by a patient with psoriatic disease, were exhibited in the event at Tokyo Tower. Over 1,000 people came to the event, and most of them stopped at the cartoons. Also, some of the Japanese Olympic Committee members gave their messages to people with psoriatic disease.

We have done such activities to raise awareness of psoriatic disease for five years in my country. We hope that the awareness is gradually increasing but we haven’t had figures how much it has improved as compared to the moment before we started the activities. We would like to investigate how much the awareness of psoriatic disease has improved in my country in the near future.

We are aiming for a world where no one suffers from psoriatic disease. Our goal is that psoriatic disease is as well-known to general people as atopic dermatitis in my country. Just in case, almost all Japanese people know about what atopic dermatitis is, including that it is not an infectious disease and etc. There are lots of things that we have to do to achieve our goal. However, all we can do is very limited. We have built a solid partnership with pharmaceutical companies to make it happen in collaboration with them. Also, the continuous supports from IFPA would be greatly appreciated.